Month: July 2010

Racist Tea Party Expression

by digby

Joan Walsh delivers a beautiful upper cut today with this excellent screed:

A lot of white conservatives are upset with the NAACP this week for daring to talk about racists in the Tea Party movement. The group passed a resolution asking the Tea Party to condemn the racists in its midst. It didn’t denounce the entire Tea Party, as simple-minded folk like Sarah Palin have claimed; it merely tries to take supporters at their word that only a tiny fringe of the movement harbors any racist sentiment, by asking those supporters to denounce that fringe. What’s the problem? Palin took to her Facebook page to explain what the problem is. After consuming many paragraphs of Palin’s tasty word salad, I’m still not sure what she’s saying, except that Todd is part Yupik Eskimo, she and Todd and his family just spent some time together, and how dare the NAACP introduce race into our political debates when she’s just fresh from a nice visit to an Eskimo village? She did quote from “Jesus loves the little children,” though …

She hits all the high points from various Tea Partiers around the country who condemned the NAACP for being racist culminating with this one, which is pretty unbelievable, even by their standards:

But the ever-vile Mark Williams, a spokesman for Tea Party Express, Inc., outdid all of his right-wing colleagues, comparing the NAACP to slave traders when it comes to exploiting blacks:

You’re dealing with people who are professional race baiters, who make a very good living off of this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong, with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history.

Then Williams outdid himself, with a mock letter to President Lincoln from Ben Jealous, asking for a return to slavery:

Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!… Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Williams, you’ll recall, is also the guy who said African Americans were too stupid to get out of the way of Hurricane Katrina: “They didn’t have the necessary brains and common sense to get out of the way of a Cat 5 Hurricane and then when it hit them- stood on the side of the convention Center expiring while reporters were coming and going” (h/t Crooks and Liars).

Also recall that the Tea Party Express is one of the early astro-turf organizations put together by Dick Armey and his well funded backers and which was heavily promoted by FOX:

Fox & Friends tells viewers “how you can join” Tea Party Express. During its August 19 broadcast, Fox & Friends hosted Tea Party Express organizer and OCDB vice chairman Mark Williams, who has said Obama lacks a valid birth certificate and has compared “Obama’s death panels” to Nazi experiments. During the segment, Fox News helped viewers find out “how you can join” the tour by noting the dates and locations of 22 upcoming stops. Fox News anchor Bream: “We want to let folks know” Tea Party schedule so “they can be a part” of events. The August 23 edition of Fox News’ America’s News HQ hosted Williams to promote the tour. During the segment, host Shannon Bream said of the tour’s schedule:

BREAM: You do have a bit of a cohesive, at least organized schedule — we want to let folks know you’re going to be making — WILLIAMS: Yes. BREAM: — 34, 35 stops, I believe it is, all across the country, so if they want to come out and take part, they certainly can be a part of what you’re doing, and, you know, this has definitely struck a chord with people.

Jenkins promotes upcoming Fox coverage on Greta. On the August 25 edition of Fox News’ On the Record, correspondent Griff Jenkins promoted Fox News’ coverage of the Tea Party Express, stating that “a Tea Party Express, which we will cover here, begins Friday in California, making its way all the way to Washington.” Fox’s Business’ Cavuto hosts Williams to promote tea parties. During the August 27 edition of Fox Business’ Cavuto, host Neil Cavuto promoted the tour and interviewed Williams. During the segment, Fox Business ran a graphic map of the tour’s path through the country and posted the tour’s website address. ” ‘Hannity’ Hops the Tea Party Express!” In an August 27 post on Sean Hannity’s FoxNews.com blog, a producer wrote that Hannity “will be along for the ride!” adding: “Click here for more on the tour and to find the tea party nearest you.” From the post, titled, ” ‘Hannity’ Hops the Tea Party Express!”:

Starting tomorrow, the Tea Party Express will begin its 16-day, 35-city tour across the nation, rallying Americans to stand up against out-of-control government spending… and ‘Hannity’ will be along for the ride! With video camera in hand, our own Griff Jenkins will be catching all the action on the road and filing reports for The Great American Blog as the Express makes its way from Sacramento, CA to the Taxpayer March on Washington, D.C. Sept. 12! Click here for more on the tour and to find the tea party nearest you.

There are many more examples of Mark Williams being featured all over FOX news programming. So please, don’t tell me that this guy is an outlier, a fringe member of the tea party, someone who doesn’t fairly represent their views. Everybody was perfectly happy to have him all over right wing media for months. If he doesn’t represent them you’d think someone would have spoken up by now, since he’s on television constantly as a national tea party spokesman..

Goldilocks Triangulation

by digby

There’s a ton of discussion this morning about this article in which unnamed White House functionaries run to Politico to complain that nobody understands them. I think it pretty much speaks for itself, but there are some points worth discussing.

First of all, the central premise seems to be that liberals should be happy that Obama has “gotten something done” without regard to what that “something” is. But the fact is that professional politicians always rattle off a legislative laundry list while activists care about process, politics and policy — and average voters only care about the results. (The press cares about “the score”, however they decide to define it that day.) A successful president is expected to know how to manage all of that — and browbeating his voters is rarely a winning strategy.

Therefore, his political advisers should know that when the country is still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures after nearly two years, the passage of an inadequate stimulus bill, which unrealistic benchmarks and a giddy victory party ensured would be the only chance they got, the only people who will consider that a “success” would be beltway insiders. They should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what’s gone before, combined with the administration’s unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuse of the last administration — indeed expanding on them in some cases — would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.

Since the Village is essentially a Republican town perhaps they assumed that liberals were all going to be the same dead-enders the Bush cultists were, defending their man until the day he was out of office (and then insisting they never liked him in the first place.) That’s what “little people” (and paid political hacks) are supposed to do. But liberals are not known for cultlike devotion to their leaders — ask Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.(JFK was on the verge of an insurrection over Vietnam and civil rights and we’ll never know how he would have handled it.) In the last 50 years, the only president who maintained the support of his liberal base was Bill Clinton and it had far more to do with the nature of the congressional opposition and the extreme hostility of the press (and a big, fat tech bubble) than support for his policies. Plus, as Rick Perlstein pointed out to me the other day, he noticed while reviewing some of his speeches of the era that regardless of his Third Way proclivities, even the unabashedly centrist Clinton used populist rhetoric, which at least kept the notion of the middle class and support for those who “work hard and play by the rules” as a sacrosanct value, something which is obviously no longer true. The unemployed, foreclosed-upon and over-stressed middle class are now being openly told by Republicans that they get what they deserve and there’s barely a peep of protest. (“There’s not a great appetite for additional spending.”) Indeed, they’re being exhorted to sacrifice even more — while the malefactors of great wealth get richer by the day.

Which brings us to the real problem for Obama among all Americans, not just his base, which is his neo-liberal economic policy and the often dry New Democrat political rhetoric that enables it. It does not surprise me much because he signaled early on in the campaign that he was going to govern like a cautious centrist and immediately upon taking office started chattering about “Grand Bargains” on social security and medicare. I took a lot of criticism for pointing that out at the time, from people who felt I wasn’t giving him a chance (and who oddly believed the right had been completely vanquished…) But I don’t think there was ever much of a mystery about whether or not he was a technocratic “pragmatist” who believed that this recession was simply a market correction that would turn itself around with a few tweaks here and there to make it more “efficient.” Everything the administration did signaled they believed they were forced to intervene by political rather than economic necessity. Their eyes were on an “Obama Goes to China” legacy on so-called entitlement reform. The tepid stimulus and continued insistence on coddling Republicans all flowed from that.

And in the first year, political hubris was everywhere. The premature victory laps gave them little room to maneuver when things didn’t go as planned. For instance, aside from serious misgivings about the substance, one of the reasons liberals didn’t celebrate the final passage of the health care bill (which the Politico article holds out as an example of immature leftist pique) was the fact that the Democrats held at least four earlier victory celebrations each of which then had to be dialed back when some Senate princeling or braindead congressman decided to use the opportunity to punch another hippie. After a while one felt a little bit foolish for feeling even slightly positive only to find oneself once again ritually sacrificed to give Joe Lieberman another thrill up his leg. By the time it was over, it was nothing more than a relief at best.

A congressman pointed out this hubristic comment from the president early in the year when House members tried to tell him that things were grim in their districts:

“They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

The expectations game has been very badly played by the administration all the way along. That they are now apparently calling on Bill Clinton to advise and Robert Gibbs is saying publicly that the House in is play is sadly ironic.

Still, running to Politico to complain about the immature liberals would seem to be even more counterproductive than usual. Indeed, it’s so counterproductive that I have to assume this is a conscious triangulation tactic. After all, if what you are upset about is liberals failing to be properly supportive, it hardly seems wise to take to the Drudge Daily to complain about them, does it? But then even these anonymous whiners can’t be so stupid as to think browbeating a bunch of liberal bloggers has any meaning among anyone but the Village elite so that’s obviously what this is about — creating a Goldilocks meme among the media that says because Obama is criticized by both the immature bloggers and the radical tea party, he must be juuust riiiight. That won’t do the Democrats any good in the short run, but it sounds like a 2012 strategy in the making.

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“Only An Expert Can Deal With The Problem”

by digby

Laurie Anderson:

Laurie Anderson created an unforgettable four minutes of late-night television when she performed a revised version of “Only an Expert,” from her recently released Nonesuch album, Homeland, on Late Night with David Letterman last night on CBS. As she has in this week’s live performances of songs from Homeland in Philadelphia and New York, and will tomorrow night at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, Anderson added references to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (“Sometimes, when the oil dill breaks, and the oil spills out into the ocean …”) to the song’s sardonic chorus, “Only an expert can deal with the problem.”

At the song’s end, Letterman, on his way to greet the performers, says emphatically: “Exactly. That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

I applauded in my living room.

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Jesus Was A Lethal Weapon

by digby

It looks like Glenn Beck‘s been watching”Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Temptation Of Christ” back to back again. He’s doing his Mel Gibson impression:

[T]hree days before the resurrection, Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, himself was tortured and hung on a cross. Beck says that even then Jesus was only a victor—“If Jesus was a victim he would have come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did.”

Anybody have a problem with that? I didn’t think so.

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Let Them Eat Grapes Of Wrath

by digby

Total profits of U.S. corporations, as compiled by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, were at $1.50 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2007 and reached $1.59 trillion in the first quarter of 2010. Over that same period, the country lost 8.2 million jobs, or 5.9% of the job base. In other words, about one out of 20 jobs has simply disappeared. While job growth has resumed in recent months, the pace of job creation remains glacial, and as the chart shows, not nearly sufficient to recoup the losses suffered any time soon. Corporations have been able to restore their profitability in the midst of the worst economy in generations even though sales levels are still below those before the recession began. When employers are able to recover their profits many years before their employees can even hope to attain the income and employment levels they had prior to recession’s devastation, economic policy is clearly skewed in favor of corporations and not workers.

Well maybe they are skewed in favor of the corporations, but don’t people understand that profits are hardly even worth having if people have to pay taxes on them? It’s like a slap in the face, especially when bloggers are being so rude to them and all. CEOs have feelings too — they put their Armani slacks on one leg at a time, just like you do. So while they may be making money hand over fist, they feel unloved and unappreciated. Those people running out of benefits should walk a mile in those CEOs’ Prada slip-ons and see what real suffering is. I think they’d learn a thing or two.

All the spoiled unemployed layabouts have to do is snap out of it and start doing the work the free market is providing. As this fine fellow from the Heritage Foundation indicated the other day on Hardball — unemployment insurance is keeping people from piling their family in the jalopy and heading out to Nebraska where the jobs are:

MATTHEWS: But who are these people in the lines every time a job opens in New York that seems to be reasonably OK? Not even attractive, just OK—a job that exists, and the lines are around the corner. What do you think that is? That phenomenon we‘re looking at?

SHERK: Well, part of that is from the unemployment benefits. The New York economy has been hammered. The financial industry has, you know, taken a heavy toll. A lot of investment banks have gone down. With those investment banks, a lot of the New York economy. And so, if you want to find a job, a lot of the workers now in New York or unemployed are going to have to move to different state. They‘re going to have to move to, say, Nebraska, or to Texas, or one of the states where the economy isn‘t doing as poorly.

But when you got the two years of benefits, it encourages the workers to look for the jobs in New York instead of looking for the jobs, say, in another state.

If they would just cut off his unemployment, Tom Joad, laid off Wall Street broker, would pack up and move to Nebraska and get a job as a Walmart stock boy. And his wife Rosasharn, the former IT administrator, can get her foot in the door at the local Denny’s washing dishes. Seriously folks, what’s the big deal? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of jobs in Omaha. Just ask Ben Nelson.

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Ferchristsake

by digby

It’s like dealing with emotionally disturbed 2 year olds having a tantrum:

Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), one of the Senate’s most senior members, said Republicans are “not going to put up with” an action-packed lame-duck session.

“They know it’s likely there will be less Democrats in the Senate if Republicans are lucky enough by the end of this year,” Hatch said. “So there will be a big push to try to make a big stink. As you can see, lame ducks don’t work. Republicans aren’t going to roll over and play dead if they want to play politics at the end of the year.”

The right wing is also making noises about a prospective lame-duck session — even though Republicans used lame-duck sessions to attempt to pass major legislation when they controlled Congress. Freedom Works, the conservative organization run by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), is circulating a “No Lame Duck” petition. The group’s website warns that Democrats — after potentially losing control of the House — could push through tax increases and stimulus-type bills, even though there are no plans to do so.

“When will politicians finally get the message?!” reads the petition, which is being sent to members of Congress.

Boehner’s statement and the Freedom Works initiative are clearly aimed at painting the Democrats as mucking with the will of voters and tricking the public by enacting laws after votes alter the membership of Congress and before a new session begins.

As Dave Weigel wrote, “Am I the only one who remembers that the House *impeached the president* during the 1998 lame duck?”

Apparently. Of course, impeaching a president over a private sexual matter had absolutely nothing to do with “mucking with the will of the voters” so it was fine and dandy.

These guys are awfully confident. They were awfully confident in 1998 too. There was a wonderful documentary done during that campaign called “The Fall Of Newt” which followed him all over the country as he boldly predicted that they GOP was going to win up to 40 seats:

[W]hen Gingrich is campaigning just before the election in his own Georgia district, Pack catches him taking a cat nap in the back of a British double-decker bus. Gingrich wakes up to a nightmare. Rather than gaining between 10 and 40 House seats, his Republican conference shrinks by five members.

“This was a night I was generally confused,” Gingrich confesses. “It was not the election I would have predicted.”

What’s that old saying about counting your lame ducks before you pay your doctor with them?

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Don’t Blame Them

by digby

… selfishness is their religion and Ayn Rand is their golden idol.

What with the Republicans all coming out against any raising of taxes to fix the deficit and insisting that unemployment benefits must be paid for with offsets but tax cuts for the wealthy do not, I think it’s helpful to look at this chart once again:

Deficit Posers, every last one of them. There is no reason to pay even one tiny bit attention to these hypocrites. They’d rather have 90% of the nation living like those poor Haitians rather than give up one thin dime of their inheritances and ill-gotten gains.

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We Just Disagree

by digby

Do the tea partiers care about economic justice? Dylan Ratigan thinks so:

How do you deal with the issue of some very valid concerns and issues that exist inside of the tea party and some very invalid in my opinion and very ineffective and in my opinion destructive messengers delivering what may very well be a valid message? … So how do you deal with that? Because we actually need their energy. We need people who understand how unfair and how unjust our government’s function is, whether you call yourself a liberal or a conservative, p0rogressive, call yourself whatever you want. Whatever you call yourself you can see how unfair it is.

And their energy is goes to that unfairness but manifests itself in really stupid destructive ways that leads to … billboards like this. How do you keep the good and get rid of the bad?

Listen, the fight for economic justice is a valid fight that needs as many warriors as possible. We can’t mix up the fight for economic justice with whatever’s pissing them off that day or whatever’s crazy. But economic justice cannot be taken from us because we’re distracted by these things either.

The Democratic strategist on the panel added:

Listen this is unfair to the tea party who have legitimate complaints that we’ve talked about. We’re seeing the same thing with some of the more racist elements of the trea party. They undermine the entire movement.

I would argue that racism is intrinsic to the movement, a fundamental bedrock of their belief system, but I’ll set that aside for now. However, what part of the rest of their movement cares about “economic justice?” Sure they hate the bailouts. And I have no doubt that they believe that the government is unjust and unfair. But do they define that the same way a liberal would define them?

You be the judge. Here’s how the Tea Party defined their economic views when they wrote the Maine Republican platform: To Promote the General Welfare: a. Return to the principles of Austrian Economics, and redirect the economy back to one of incentives to save and invest. b. Cut spending, balance the budget, and institute a plan for paying down debt. Proclaim that generational debt shifting is immoral and unconscionable and will not be tolerated! c. Pass and implement Fed bill #1207 (Introduced by Ron Paul), to Audit the Federal Reserve, as the first step in Ending the Fed. d. Return to transparent and honest reporting of economic statistics free of gimmicks and distortions. e. Require the government and all its agencies adhere to the same GAAP accounting rules that businesses must follow. f. Restore the provisions of welfare reform removed with the stimulus bill. g. Defeat Cap and Trade, investigate collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth, and prosecute any illegal collusion. h. Freeze current stimulus funds, prohibit any further stimulus bills, and apply all unspent funds towards the debt they created. i. Promote energy independence aggressively by removing the obstacles created by government to allow private development of our resources; natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power. j. Institute Zero based budgeting on all programs. k. Espouse and follow the principle: It is immoral to steal the property rightfully earned by one person, and give it to another who has no claim or right to its benefits.
Sure, they like to think of that as “economic justice” but I certainly don’t agree. And validating them by saying they have “legitimate complaints” and asserting that we all agree that “the government is unfair and unjust” without noting that what liberals think is unfair and unjust about the government — policies that favor the rich and powerful and its assaults on civil liberties — are not the same things the tea partiers think are unfair and unjust — a redistributionist tax system and welfare state — is to give these anti-government cranks far too much credit. In fact our philosophies are diametrically opposed.

Once you get past two issues (that the government should not bail out Wall Street and the Fed should be audited) there is nothing that liberals and tea partiers believe in common. They think everything the government does is a bailout — including unemployment insurance and public education. They are anti-government radicals who consider anyone even slightly to their left as socialists who are destroying everything they hold dear.

Ratigan is an interesting guy and I often appreciate his aggressive posture against the malefactors of great wealth. But I don’t think we agree on the way American politics works. Validating the tea party as believers in “economic justice” is being a useful idiot for the very people he loathes.

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Race To The Bottom

by digby

Chris Cilizza has written another column on Obama’s eroding support of “the white vote.” He does make sure to include the information that Obama actually won a higher proportion of the white vote than most Democrats, so the erosion in his standing among whites isn’t necessarily a reflection of racism.

But this does beg the question. If the administration were to focus on regaining its mojo among white voters, what are the policies that white voters are unhappy about and everyone else is fine with? Are they related to race at all and, if not, then why is there a difference between whites and the rest of the country? Class? Social strata?

I’m genuinely curious about this. I don’t know how the White House is supposed to respond to concerns of “white voters” without understanding this and if it has nothing to do with the fact that they are white, then I don’t think it’s a very useful way of delineating this cohort.

On the other hand, if white voters tend to gravitate toward one party, while people of color gravitate toward the other, is it strange to question whether race and ethnicity might have something to do with it? But none of these discussions of “the white vote” ever seem to do that. Indeed, it’s almost as if such a question is out of bounds because it implies that race might have something to do with why people of different races vote differently. It’s very odd.

And speaking of which, Sarah Palin’s comments yesterday deserve a little comment:

HANNITY: You know, Governor, you have been one of the strongest, most outspoken members in support of the Tea Party Movement. I’ve met a lot of members, organizers in the Tea Party Movement. I’ve been at some of their rallies. I’ve witnessed it up close and personal. Members of the NAACP are going to vote tomorrow on a resolution that condemns what the group calls — the NAACP — explicitly racist behavior by supporters of the Tea Party Movement. Wanted to get your reaction to that. PALIN: Yes. This is some typical divisive politics that is so absolutely unnecessary, especially at this time of turmoil within our country. Turmoil when you consider the state of the economy and so many other challenges that we are facing. This is just so unnecessary. No, the Tea Party Movement is a beautiful movement, full of diverse people, diverse backgrounds. Folks of all walks of life who, for the most part, happen to oppose President Obama’s policies. Not the color of his skin. They don’t care that he’s half white or half black. It has nothing to do with the person’s skin tone —

That’s an unusual way of putting it don’t you think? It’s true that his mother is white, but Obama identifies as black and most Americans accept that and see him as black. And people these days don’t normally think of themselves or others as “half” anything, what with the old unpleasantness about having “drops of negro blood” and all that. Now Palin may very well not be aware of all that — in fact I’d be shocked if she had any idea that the way she put that is freighted with some other meaning. But it does reveal that she associates with those who are very well aware of what that means.
Certain people commonly refer to him as “half black” and they do it for a reason. People like Ann Coulter:

Barack’s really been kind of coasting on his record, since his first big accomplishment of being born half-black. I keep hearing people say, “Oh, Obama could never be elected because he’s half-black. You know, ’cause we’re just such a racist country.” What are they talking about? He wouldn’t be running for president if he weren’t half-black. He’d be Dick Durbin with less experience.

It’s basically an affirmative action slam, saying that Obama’s a white guy who has used his “half blackness” to unfairly go to the head of the line. And it’s also a way of “explaining” why he seems like a nice well-behaved fellow, even though he has that dark skin. He’s half white, you see. It’s just another whine about the victimization of poor white guys like Rush Limbaugh who are being marginalized by reverse racist phonies like Barack Obama, who get all “the goodies:”

It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he’s decided he’s got to go all in on the black side, and therefore, I think — I saw this endorsement. Bill Richardson, who has — grab sound bite 22. Bill Richardson, showing up with a goatee and a dangling mustache, like Fu Manchu with the beard — with a little goatee there. And that’s not by accident, ladies and gentlemen.

You know, there’s a big argument in the — between the Hispanic community and black community over who is the official American minority, because the official American minority gets the goodies.

And this:

It is offensive to the sensibilities of millions of people to hear a member of State-Run Media refer to a half black-half white human being with no experience running anything of substance referred to as a god…

Couple people with an e-mail: “Rush, that was great, why did you have to refer to Obama as half black and half white? You know everybody’s going to focus on that.” I intend them to focus on it. Remember the context. Evan Thomas said he was above America, above the world, he’s a god. Barack Obama is a human being. He is not a god. I was simply trying to, shall we say, emphasize that proclamation by describing his humanity.

That Palin would use this particular description in this particular discussion is revealing. Nobody other than right wingers with racist baggage describe him that way. I give her a break simply because I don’t think she’s sophisticated enough with language to necessarily know what she’s saying. She often parrots what she hears without knowing the sub-text.

The fact is that race is a construct. Most of us are of “mixed race” to some degree and certainly most African Americans are. But society still makes the distinction pretty clear. As Obama himself pithily put it:

“You know, when I’m catching a cab in Manhattan in the past, I think I’ve given my [black] credentials.”

It’s more than a little ironic that the very people who are so explicit about his racial make-up being “half-black” are the same people who make that “credential” still carry so much weight.

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The Agenda

by digby

Here’s a positive headline for you from the Boston Globe:

Obama picks adviser to cut deficit

“Jack’s challenge over the next few years is to use his extraordinary skill and experience to cut down that deficit and put our nation back on a fiscally responsible path. And I have the utmost faith in his ability to achieve this goal as a central member of our economic team,’’ Obama said.

Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, called Lew “a superb choice’’ and a person of “the highest integrity.’’

“He knows how to make the tough choices. And he knows how to reach across the aisle to find bipartisan solutions,’’ Conrad said.

Obama also said this:

“At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own.”

Any questions?

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